National report

WASHINGTON -- Sen. John McCain, considered the front-runner for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination, intends to launch an exploratory committee next week, GOP officials said Friday.

The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid pre-empting a public statement from the four-term Arizona senator.

McCain, the GOP maverick who unsuccessfully sought his party's nomination in 2000, already has opened a bank account for the committee, one official said.

Aides to McCain say the senator will discuss whether to seek the presidency with his family over the Christmas holiday, and make a final decision thereafter.

New national cemetery will be at Fort Jackson

COLUMBIA, S.C. -- A new national cemetery will be located at Fort Jackson, a sprawling Army base just east of downtown, officials said Friday.

The new 600-acre cemetery would accommodate up to 25,000 graves and become the state's third federally run veterans cemetery, said William Tuerk, the Veterans Affairs' undersecretary for memorial affairs.

"We intend to move quickly ... so that a convenient, close-to-home burial option can be provided to central South Carolinians of my father's generation," Tuerk said at a Veterans Day parade in Columbia.

The VA plans to seek $20 million to build the new cemetery in the fiscal year that begins in October 2007, and burials could begin in 2008, officials have said.

NASA trying to contact Mars probe

LOS ANGELES -- NASA's Mars Global Surveyor has been out of contact with Earth for nearly a week and engineers tried Friday to re-establish communication with the craft, which may be showing its age after 10 years in space.

The space agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena lost contact with the probe for two days last week, then received a weak carrier signal with no data on Sunday. Since then, Surveyor has not confirmed receiving a command to point one of its transmitters to Earth, project manager Tom Thorpe said.

The Global Surveyor was launched on Nov. 7, 1996, to systematically map Mars while orbiting the Red Planet. It has operated longer than the other Martian exploration craft.

Record number of Saudis pursuing U.S. education

WASHINGTON -- A record number of nearly 11,000 Saudis are pursuing higher education in the United States, reversing a years-long decline in students coming from the oil-rich kingdom, particularly after the 2001 terrorist attacks.

The surge is a result of recent measures taken by the U.S. and Saudi governments, including a major Saudi government scholarship program for study abroad, launched last year, and implementation of more organized procedures for issuing student visas by the U.S. Embassy in the kingdom.

The education initiative, which also envisions a second scholarship program to enable U.S. scholars to study and teach in Saudi Arabia, arose from a mutual desire to counter growing hostility between the populations of both nations sparked by the discovery that 15 of the 19 hijackers Sept. 11, 2001, were Saudi citizens, according to officials on both sides and Middle East experts.

WORLD REPORT

New mass grave discovered in Bosnia

SNAGOVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina -- Forensic experts said Friday they found a new mass grave in northeastern Bosnia believed to contain the remains of more than 100 victims of the 1995 Srebrenica massacre where Serb forces buried some of the almost 8,000 victims.

The grave in Snagovo village, about 30 miles north of Srebrenica, was found after experts received a tip from an undisclosed source, said Murat Hurtic, head of Bosnia's Missing Persons Commission.

It is the seventh mass grave Hurtic's team has found near Srebrenica, the scene of Europe's worst massacre since World War II.

Shiite clerics call for Hussein's execution

BAGHDAD, Iraq -- Addressing worshippers for the first time since the conviction of Saddam Hussein, many Iraqi Shiite preachers called Friday for the speedy hanging of the former Iraqi president.

Saddam, a Sunni Arab who long repressed Iraq's Shiite majority, should be executed in public between two of the holiest Shiite sites in Iraq, a cleric demanded during his sermon in Karbala.

"It's the least that could be done to this tyrant for the atrocious crimes he has committed, in this city in particular," said Sayyed Ahmed al-Safi, a preacher close to Ali al-Sistani, the country's pre-eminent Shiite cleric.

The defendants had been held since September 2005 without charges after being accused of plotting to take over radio airwaves in their native country to call for an uprising to overthrow the communist government.

They, along with four Vietnamese nationals accused of the same crime, were sentenced by a judge to 15 months in prison, with credit for time served. All will be released in one month, and the Americans will have 10 days to leave the country.

Vandals tear up wreaths at Kristallnacht memorial

BERLIN -- Suspected Neo-Nazis scattered candles and tore up floral wreaths placed at a memorial stone on the 68th anniversary of Kristallnacht, police said Friday.

The vandalism came Thursday at a memorial to Kristallnacht, or Night of the Broken Glass -- a prelude to the Holocaust that saw thousands of Jewish homes, synagogues and businesses destroyed in 1938.

Police in Frankfurt an der Oder said the group tore up wreaths on a stone marking the site where the synagogue stood before it was burned down on Kristallnacht.

Sixteen people aged between 16 and 24 were arrested. Police said some shouted "Sieg Heil" -- a common Nazi-era chant -- as officers moved in to arrest them.

They were later released but remained under investigation for disrupting public order, disturbing the peace of the dead, and displaying Nazi symbols, which is a crime in Germany.